Jane “you will never be able to make both of them good for anything.” Jane Austen shows her approval of Elizabeth’s comment where she states that Jane ‘…would willingly have gone through the world without believing that so much wickedness existed in the whole race of mankind, as was here collected in one individual.’
Jane’s ‘insistence on giving everyone the benefit of the doubt results in her failure to see through Miss Bingley’s strategies, jeopardising not only her own but bingley’s happiness.’
Elizabeth unlike her older sister creates opinions of people very quickly, once she has formed this opinion it is very difficult for her to detach herself from this view, had she been more ignorant the her relationship with Mr Darcy may not have ended in marriage. It is this prejudice of Elizabeth’s that allows Jane Austen to create amusing misunderstandings in the novel.
Lydia Bennet has been neglected by her father and has become her mother’s daughter. She has turned out to be thoughtless, empty headed and vain. She was always receiving the attention of army officers and this has caused her to believe herself to be pretty. The fact is that the attention she received was not due to her beauty but due to her hyperactive behaviour and animal like spirit. Her elopement with George Wickham is typical of her character as she did think about the heart ache it would put her family through. Even after she had gone through with this in her letter she writes happily expecting her family to laugh about what she had done.
Kitty Bennet is one of the least developed characters in the novel, this is quite surprising considering her close relation to the heroin. After the disastrous elopement of Lydia, Elizabeth and Jane pay more attention due to the fear of her behaving similarly to Lydia. This produces good results. Here Jane Austen implies that if the parents would have been more careful in the upbringing of their younger daughters things would have turned out better therefore the parents are partly if not mostly to blame.
Mary Bennet is the most isolated character of the Bennet sisters. She keeps to herself and often engages in reading, studying and practicing playing the piano. At first glance it seems that she is not as bad as the younger sisters but after further inspection it becomes apparent that she is just as vain about her imagined accomplishments of playing music as Lydia is of her fancied charms. The truth is that although she may be a more accomplished piano player than her other sisters the way she plays lacks emotion, this is why Elizabeth’s less accomplished performance is more appreciated than Mary’s.
In a family of five sisters all of them have to compete with each other to gain attention, Jane has her beauty, Elizabeth has her mind and boyish behaviour, Mary has her piano playing and Lydia and Kitty both have their hyperactive and loud behaviour.
W H Smith GCSE literature guide on Pride and Prejudice